It’s usually best for journalists to stay out of the prophecy business. There’s just no percentage in it. It’s particularly important to suppress the prophetic impulse in matters concerning the Middle East (see: Iraq, Iran, etc.). It has often been said that the only constant in the Middle East is abrupt and dramatic change, a phenomenon that makes prediction even more difficult than usual. In any case, the Middle East (Israel Division, at least) has been the home to professional prophets of high reputation. It’s wise to be humble before the reputations of such men as Amos, Jeremiah and Isaiah.

And yet, on exceptional occasions, prophecy about the Middle East—accurate prophecy—manifests itself in journalism, at least in the pages of The Atlantic. Take this statement, from an article in the July 1919 issue of the magazine:

The Jewish people do not expect that all the Jews of the world will ever be gathered in Palestine. The country is too small to hold them all, and there is no universal desire to go there. In the fullness of time, there will be several million Jews in Palestine, but in all human probability the majority of Jews will still live outside its borders.

This is from an article by Harry Sacher, who wrote as a partisan of the Zionist cause. The statement is remarkable for its optimism; in 1919, there were perhaps 150,000 Jews in Palestine, and masses of Jews—particularly those in America—were plainly hostile to the Zionist idea. Sacher foresaw a seemingly implausible future, in which Zion would once again become the heart of Jewish life.

Sacher’s article is one of the first in The Atlantic to mention the phenomenon of political Zionism, which was already twenty-two years old by 1919. One could deduce that The Atlantic scanted Zionism until then because it was so thoroughly marginal a movement, even within the Jewish universe. The magazine became alert to the issue after the British conquered Palestine in 1917, and issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised to the Jews a “national home” in Palestine. Even with that promise, the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine seemed insurmountably difficult, in particular to The Atlantic’s subsequent correspondents. In July 1920, Anstruther Mackay reported from Palestine on Zionist aspirations. Mackay’s report is rampant with insupportable assertions, such as this one: “[T]he Jews of Southeastern Europe are, almost to a man, Bolsheviki. Europe and America cannot allow the possibility of a homogenous Bolshevist state in Palestine.” No prophet, this Anstruther Mackay.

On the other hand, Mackay saw no easy road to Jewish independence. He predicted catastrophe if the Jews were to assert their independence in Palestine:

It will be seen that, to fulfill their aspirations, the Zionists must obtain the armed assistance of one of the European powers, presumably Great Britain, or of the United States of America. To keep the peace in such a scattered and mountainous country the garrison would have to be a large one…. Without such armed protection, the scheme of a Jewish state, or settlement, is bound to end in failure and disaster.

Mackay underestimated Jewish determination and fighting skill (or, alternatively, overestimated Arab unity and purpose), though it is possible today to argue that Israel would succumb without the qualitative edge provided it by American weaponry and support.

An echo of Mackay’s antagonism to Jewish nationalism could be found in Albert T. Clay’s February 1921 report titled “Political Zionism.” Clay wrote with bracing hostility about the Zionist movement, and he failed to hide his suspicions about Jews generally. The founders of modern Zionism, Clay wrote,

have claimed that the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would become an active force, by bringing diplomatic pressure to bear upon the nations, to secure protection for Jews in all lands. A clannish sense of pride in the Jewish race, however, seems to be uppermost in their minds. They apparently think that their status in society will be enhanced everywhere if a Jewish nation exists in Palestine.

While I would distance myself, for reasons of taste and accuracy, from Clay’s diagnosis of Jewish clannishness, I would also say that what he feared did indeed come to pass: the success of Israel as a national Jewish project enhanced the status of Jews even in places like the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the United States.

Clay’s brand of hostility to Zionism found no echo in a 1927 article by Henry Nevinson, who admitted to a certain narrow-mindedness about Jews before becoming a witness to their national project in Palestine.

Like most Englishmen, I certainly had no prejudice in favor of the Jews. Rather the reverse, though I have always admired their exceptional intelligence, their patriotic mutual aid, and their marvelous persistence in the face of the cruelest persecution. But as I surveyed the work of the Zionist cause in tangible or visible form I was filled with a sympathetic exhilaration at the sight of so many young men and young women released from the perpetual fear under which their fathers had suffered for so many centuries.

The dominant theme in The Atlantic’s early writings on Zionism was unfriendliness.

In the July 1930 number of The Atlantic, William Ernest Hocking made the case against political Zionism, and asserted an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine. In many ways, he presaged the modern Left’s critique of Israel, as an enterprise of a people who are fundamentally foreign to the land: “Arabia will not be reconciled to Jewish dominance in Palestine. For thirteen hundred years Moslem Arabs have lived here, tilling the soil, caring for their herds, raising their fruits and olives, practicing their trades and crafts.” In making his case, Hocking elided some of the more unpleasant aspects of Arab Palestine: in particular, its leadership. He defended Haj Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, as an open-minded moderate. Husseini would later become an ally of Hitler, and lead a Bosnian Muslim SS detachment that murdered Jews.

it would be most ungenerous to fail to emphasize that Jewish penetration, while it has far from realized the earliest Zionist hopes, has in many senses benefited the Arab inhabitants of the country.… Zionism has undoubtedly changed the exterior of Arab life. It gave the Arab new and more hygienic conceptions of well-being.

Such observations now fall well outside the realm of the politically palatable, as does his analysis of Jewish land-buying practices in Palestine: “They bought partly from Arabs, in whom it is a national failing never to be able to resist the sight of money.”

There is something repulsive in Tweedy’s high-handed generalizing. But his cold distaste for both Jews and Arabs did not subvert his ability to analyze correctly, even prophetically, the difficulty of returning Jews to a land that, in their absence, had been settled by people very much unlike themselves. “Zionist immigration is out to establish itself in Palestine on lines of its own choosing,” he wrote.

On the other hand, those lines are foreign, unintelligible and antipathetic to the mentalities of the Arab communites that represent the large majority in the country. If no bridge is built, how can these two existing, and mutually repellent, social states grow side by side without endless friction.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.